Milgram, Obedience, and Ethical Leadership: Lessons for Today’s Managers
What if the most dangerous behaviour in your organization isn’t malicious intent, but ordinary people following harmful orders without question?
Executive Summary
Milgram and Asch did not study monsters — they studied ordinary people. Their classic experiments reveal how social pressure and authority shape behaviour, often pushing decent people toward harmful compliance. For modern leaders the implication is structural: ethics is less about hiring “good people” and more about designing systems, norms, and accountability so that doing the right thing is easy and going along with the wrong thing is hard.
Asch: How Group Pressure Bends Reality
Setup & finding: Participants conformed with an obviously wrong majority on line-length trials; ~75% conformed at least once.
Mechanisms: Normative influence (desire for acceptance) and informational influence (assuming the group knows better).
Resilience factor: A single ally dramatically reduces conformity.
Leadership implication: Norms matter. If the group norm is silence or deference, even correct objections disappear. Encourage at least one visible dissenter — it changes the social calculus.
Milgram: How Far Will People Go Under Orders?
Setup & finding: “Teachers” administered (fake) shocks at an experimenter’s instruction; ~65% went to the maximum. Many complied despite distress.
Key variables: Psychological distance to the victim, proximity/presence of authority, institutional prestige, and social support.
Agentic state: People often shift to “I’m following orders,” releasing personal moral agency.
Leadership implication: Authority and distance amplify obedience. Organizations must avoid structures that diffuse responsibility and create distance from human consequences.
From Labs to Offices: Organizational Manifestations
Quiet acceptance of unethical practices because “everyone else is fine with it.”
Decisions approved because a senior leader favors them.
Harm hidden behind spreadsheets, delegation, and layers of approval.
Critical question for leaders: Under what conditions might well-intentioned people drift into supporting or ignoring harmful decisions?
Five Concrete Practices for Ethical Leadership
Build real psychological safety: Invite dissent explicitly, thank people who raise concerns, respond with curiosity rather than blame.
Make consequences visible: Bring frontline stories and human impact into decision forums; reduce abstraction.
Protect and reward dissenters: Shield people who speak up; celebrate moral courage publicly.
Design accountability so it can’t evaporate: Clarify ownership for risky choices; require documented rationale and named owners.
Create multiple safe channels to raise concerns: Provide hotlines, ombuds, escalation routes, and make clear how concerns will be handled.
Ethics as Design, Not Hope
Milgram and Asch show that individual virtue alone is insufficient. Ethical leadership means shaping systems so ordinary human tendencies work for accountability and care rather than silence and harm.
Ready to Reduce Organizational Obedience Risks?
Organization Learning Labs offers ethics-by-design reviews, psychological-safety diagnostics, and escalation-path design to make questioning normal and accountability explicit.
References
Asch, S. E. (1951). Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgment. Groups, Leadership and Men.
Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371–378.
Milgram, S. (1974). Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. Harper & Row.
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly.
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